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It turns out Apple now has yet another veteran of the tech world in its "palm." Today we learned that one of the major contributors and early designers of Palm's WebOS mobile operating system has joined the folks in Cupertino as Apple's Senior User Interface Designer.

At Palm, Rich Dellinger was integral in creating the WebOS notification system and was also involved in the development of the application framework utilized by the OS on Palm's Pre. Having worked in a similar position at Palm for four years, Dellinger earned a great deal of respect from colleagues and even competitors for being the visual designer, interaction designer and engineer of WebOS.

So where did the formal announcement of Apple's new hire come from? Did a major tech blog or mobile news publication break the story? Not quite. In fact, it only became widely known that Dellinger jumped ship when he updated his LinkedIn account, which notes that Dellinger previously worked for Apple from 1999 to 2006. While there he was a user interface designer for Mac OS X, the iPod and iPhone.

"I've worked at two companies over the past 15 years," Dellinger wrote on Twitter shortly before attending a new Apple employee orientation. "There are great people doing amazing work at both places." Over the last two months, however, Palm has been hemorrhaging employees since the deal was announced that computer titan HP would purchase the embattled smartphone manufacturer for $1.2 billion.